Billie Dee's
Electronic Poetry
Anthology
Theodore Roethke
Theodore Roethke (1908 - 1963) was born in Saginaw, Michigan, where his father was a horticulturalist. The images of the greenhouse, germination, the violence and beauty of nature are central to many of his poems. Although not a prolific writer, he attracted immediate critical acclaim with his first book Open House (1941). He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1954 for The Waking. Roethke taught at various colleges throughout his carrer, finally settling at the University of Washington at Seattle in later life, where he mentored such poets as David Wagoner, Carolyn Kizer, and Richard Hugo.
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Cuttings
This urge, wrestle, resurrection of dry sticks,
Cut stems struggling to put down feet,
What saint strained so much,
Rose on such lopped limbs to a new life?
I can hear, underground, that sucking and sobbing,
In my veins, in my bones I feel it --
The small waters seeping upward,
The tight grains parting at last.
When sprouts break out,
Slippery as fish,
I quail, lean to beginnings, sheath-wet.
-- 1948
Dolor
I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,
Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper weight,
All the misery of manilla folders and mucilage,
Desolation in immaculate public places,
Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard,
The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher,
Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma,
Endless duplicaton of lives and objects.
And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions,
Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,
Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,
Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,
Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate grey standard faces.
--1943
Other Roethke links:
Academy of American Poets: Theodore Roethke
I Hear America Singing: Theodore Roethke
Ted Tapia's Home Page: Theodore Roethke